We didn’t watch the Donks last night after all. Around 6:30pm we had a nasty coldfront/windstorm pass through the valley. At our place we simply had lots of dust, flickery lights, and the garden got pretty hammered (beans and tomatoes beat up and broken).
But east of us in Boise a grassfire started that got whipped up by the winds and it roared up a bluff and created a nightmare for a large residential area on the east side of town. All the firefighters in the valley, from Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna, and the BLM were called out. More than 50 homes were evacuated. At least ten homes were completely destroyed and nine or more (at this point, it’s still dark out) are seriously damaged. And the little girl on the morning news just reported that at least one body has been found.
Needless to say, all the local channels preempted the convention last night, so I didn’t see any of it. More pressing things were happening here at home. The most moving thing I heard last night in the interviews of some of the evacuated residents was the speed with which the fire moved up the bluff and the way it hopped over streets. More than one interviewee told of smelling smoke, grabbing a few things, and barely getting out the door when their home or the home next door exploded into flames. 40 mph winds caused the flames to hop over fire lines and streets. Truly frightening stuff.
If you think about it, please pray for our neighbors. There are a lot of disrupted lives in Boise this morning.
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August 26th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
We dodged a bullet in Mountain Home ourselves last night. When I opened the house up after the temperature dropped about 15 degrees in less than an hour and the dust cleared all I could smell was smoke, which kept me up for a little while wondering if we would have to evacuate. Needless to say our prayers have been offered for those that lost everything last night including one life.